****
“NO MORE FANGIRLS! THE ROOM’S PACKED!” Saffi was shouting two months later.
The crestfallen expressions on the faces of the girls lined up outside the trailer van made Saffi guilty.
“Please, we waited so long…”
“We just want one chance to be close to them…”
Oh my God, these girls were crafty! Saffi knew from Twitter’s fangirl grapevine that word had already gotten out about how much of a softie she was. Pulling her head back, she peeked at the Celsius guys, who were grinning at her.
She counted the girls with them. One, two, three…seven in all. If one guy could please three girls at the same time…she calculated it mentally then poked her head back out. “Okay, fine, five more and that’s it!” Saffi hurriedly went back in before the others could guilt-trip her into agreeing to more compromises.
The Celsius boys were laughing at her. After spending just a week with them, Saffi had stopped being tongue-tied in their presence. Now, she looked at them as her boys, the way mother hens looked at its chicks.
“What’s with five,” Calvin, the youngest of the group, asked curiously.
She fidgeted.
Wynd, the leader of the group, looked at her with interest. “Okay, ‘fess up – how did you arrive at that number?”
“Well…” Seeing in their faces that they wouldn’t let go until she answered them truthfully, Saffi sighed, mumbling, “I just thought that if a guy could please three girls at the same time, and then I multiplied that by 4, so that makes 12. We already have seven---” She stopped explaining as the entire van rocked with the boy band’s laughter. Even the fangirls were giggling.
“It’s not that funny,” Saffi protested. “I really was giving you the benefit of the doubt!”
Aaron, the biggest flirt of the four, sauntered towards her. “You don’t understand, Saffi, my love.” He had the cutest accent as well, like a mixture of British, American, and Korean, that even now Saffi couldn’t help but swallow hard at the sound of it. “We’re just impressed at, ahh, how logical you dealt with the problem.”
“But I have to ask,” the serious-minded Leo drawled. “Why did you think that one guy can only please three?”
She blinked. “How can a guy please more? One girl in each hand, and then one girl---” She stopped, seeing that the boys were doing their best to suppress their laughter. Ah, dammit, they had successfully baited her into answering one of their silly questions again!
“Ha-ha, very funny!”
The door opened and her assistant P.A. came in, carrying a case of beer for the crew. He was red-haired, freckled, and chubby with the sweetest and quietest disposition, unable to look at Saffi directly whenever she had to talk to him and always keeping at least a foot of distance between them.
“Hi, Bryan,” she greeted him cheerfully, hoping this would be the night that he would finally warm up to her.
He mumbled a greeting.
She had to smile sheepishly at Bryan’s typical response. “You kill me, Bry. You really do. Am I that bad?” Saffi teased him, but she was only half-serious. Sometimes, she couldn’t help but feel like she had this viral infection that kept Bryan away from her.
The others laughed at her question, but she and Bryan ignored them. Of course he didn’t answer her either.
Saffi waited for him to distribute the beer then started to help him stack the freezer with the rest of the bottles. At the first step she took to get closer to him, he accidentally dropped a bottle on her foot and she cried out in pain as the bottle broke into pieces, its shards biting into the tender skin of one sandal-clad foot.
“Fuck! You okay, Saffi?” The entire band had surrounded her in an instant, but when she looked up, she was surprised to see that Bryan was the one closest to her and his chubby face was clenched hard with worry.
“Are you okay?” he asked in his usual gruff voice.
She nodded. “It just hurts a little.” She managed a smile even though her foot stung like hell.
Bryan looked like he wanted to kill himself.
Her heart went out to him. “It’s okay, really, Bryan.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “My fault…let me help you.” And then he was swinging her into his arms, making Saffi gasp in shock. For a rather unwieldy guy, he felt exceptionally strong.
“This is not...”
But Bryan was already carrying her out of the trailer van.
“…appropriate,” she ended lamely as he walked faster than she ever saw him walk.
****
Staffan did his best to keep calm as he carried Saffi to his own trailer – the one he kept for show. He had another one parked far from the crew’s site, which he used to have his makeup and prosthetics done. He had made sure that Saffi had her own as well, never mind if it set tongues wagging. No f**king way would he have let his wife share a f**king trailer with anyone who had a dick.
He gave his code gruffly and waited for Saffi to punch the numbers in so that the doors to his trailer would automatically open. He wondered if she realized that the numbers spelled her name.
“I’m really okay---”
She sounded extremely uneasy and he couldn’t blame her. This was the closest he had allowed himself to be with her, in his new disguise, and he already knew it was a f**king mistake. Inside the trailer, he swiftly lowered her to the sofa and moved away instantly, trying not to be obvious as he struggled to get himself – and his dick – under control. He willed his dick to die, but it was stubborn – as well as doing its best to get past the padding that his prosthetics team painstakingly applied to him every f**king day at four in the morning in his other trailer.
Sometimes, Staffan had been so f**king tired working his ass off for those pretty boys that he slept in his disguise. He always regretted it in the morning, feeling like he was burning up inside all the f**king padding.
Two months, Staffan thought as he got the first-aid kit out and started to assemble what he needed to clean and treat Saffi’s wound. For two f**king months he had been with Saffi, looking after her and only just f**king able to look at her while all the other men did their best to get into his wife’s pants.
Only the members of the band and their manager had known who he was and those f**king idiots had done their best to provoke him, flirting outrageously with Saffi every time he was around.
“I’ll clean your wound now,” he declared gruffly.
She nodded.